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Our Daily Thread 7-31-15

Good Morning!

It’s Friday!!!

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On this day in 2002 my daughter ‘Liz was born. 🙂

This is for her, since she requested it. 🙂

From American Greetings

And since you can’t have a party without balloons….

7-29-15 Liz party 0067-29-15 Liz party 002

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Anyone have a QoD?

68 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-31-15”

  10. Bonne Anniversaire, Liz!

    Love the header photo. When I was small, we seemed to have hot air balloons go over our area every year. One once made a landing in a nearby field. Never see them now.

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  11. Chas, the Roarin’ Twenties are almost back upon us!

    Oh, AJ. All you can do is love ’em and pray. You need to make a list of everything you ever did that probably gave your parents grey hairs and beg God not to revisit it upon you. Letting them back out of the driveway the first time without you in the car to try to keep them safe will give you more than a few grey hairs. Waiting up for them to come home will give you bags under your eyes. Prepare yourself. Your precious, darling girl is going to get hormonal and you will truly wonder if there really are aliens and if one has invaded your home. I have reminded myself many times that I begged God for this child and He gave her to me. She has tap danced on my bladder and mostly my heart.
    Then one day they are human again and you look at them in wonder—it will almost be like the first time you saw her. She will need you more as a teen than she did as a toddler. She will get hurt and she will cry but a kiss from Daddy won’t make the boo boo better. There will be some flash backs and along the way you will find some humor….like Monday when BG spit out blood from having her teeth removed—we curled up in her bed and she cried and drooled on me. She hasn’t drooled on me since she was a wee little girl..

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  14. Hot air balloons: When I was a teenager, some hot-air balloon gathering used to take off annually from a field not far behind where we were living. We could walk outside our mobile home court and see perhaps two hundred balloons taking off, many of them flying low over our heads. My own favorites were the one shaped like Mr. Peanut and the one that was decorated with the lovely Arizona flag.

    That gathering later moved to New Mexico, but for a few years it was very close to home.

    We had a balloon go low over our house here one day; I’m not good with measurements, but let’s say it was 20 feet over us. It was extremely low, not far over the rooftop, and obviously just rising, with a very good view of the people in the basket. My husband said, “Let’s let Misten out and see what she does.” So we did. And she saw this beast right over us, and she physically braced herself in a crouch (like she was preparing to take on a bull) and barked with some fear as though she didn’t know what to make of it, “Move on, whatever you are. I’m serious now. I think I am anyway.” And as it moved across our yard and gained altitude, she ran after it and barked more confidently as it obeyed her directions. But I would love to have a photo of that collie crouched on the porch in the shadow of that giant balloon.

    We also get occasional para-sailers, or something like that, over the field behind us. We’ve had one this month.

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  15. One of my first dates with Mr P was to take BG and a friend to the hot air balloon festival near us. For his birthdday I gave him a hot air balloon Christmas ornament.

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  16. Elizabeth and I are off to spend some of her birthday money on hobbits, jedis, and other assorted action figures. I’m glad she’s moved on from dolls at least. 🙂 Well, mostly…..

    She gets that from her Nanny (my Mom), who was a Barbie collector. Elizabeth has now picked up the mantle. 🙄

    Sadly though, it doesn’t look like Cheryl will be joining us. 😦

    And if you’ll notice, I have now started calling her Elizabeth again. As I’ve been typing this I can hear my wife on the phone with her mother discussing how I now have everyone calling her ‘Liz and how much she hates that. 😯

    I figured I better take the hint. 🙂

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  22. Michelle, I forwarded that link to my husband. I’ve seen the movie once; he owns the book and everything by Clancy, and he has often told the story of how no one would publish the book until it was published by someone who’d never published fiction and it became a surprise best-seller . . .

    I saw the movie one Thanksgiving in college. I’d gone with my roommate to stay with a friend and some other people (I think they were family of the friend, but I really don’t remember). We watched that movie and maybe one or two others, but then I got sick and spent the rest of the long weekend in bed and throwing up. I remember, though, that the group had just two or three movies, and they spent the whole weekend watching and rewatching them, and even at the time I thought I picked a very good time to be sick. It would have been a miserable weekend for me even if I hadn’t been sick (there’s just no way I want to watch the same movie more than once over three days, let alone three or four times, and I would have had a choice between being “rude” and locking myself in the bedroom to shut out at least some of the noise, which would have been incredibly lonely too, or being out there until I gradually went insane). So all told, I was happier to spend the weekend throwing up and lying in bed, where at least I had an excuse not to be watching non-stop videos. I don’t remember what the other movies were, or whether I watched any of the others before getting sick; I only know I watched this one, and liked it–but was glad to only have to watch it once.

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  23. My sister’s middle name is Elisabeth or Elizabeth (she herself isn’t sure which, which this word person finds odd . . . I’m pretty sure hers has the z, though). She’s never used it (obviously), except that she had one job that was often overnight at a gas station, and she didn’t really feel like it was the safest of jobs. (She got locked in overnight, and customers paid through a window instead of coming in, but still. That was in the day when gas stations foolishly encouraged cash payments by charging more for credit cards, and were thus an ideal place to rob. She also had neither a car nor a telephone in those days, and lived in a seedy little place.)

    Anyway, at that job she went by Liz, and she explained that it was partly to see how she liked it, and partly so if she was out around town and someone said, “Hi, Liz,” she knew it was a customer and not someone she needed to be able to recognize, like someone from church.

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  24. Happy Birthday Elizabeth! Love the singing birthday cats, they brought Tess running (but Annie, who’s stretched out across the back of the couch at my neck, didn’t open an eye). I remember announcing to my dad that I was a “teenager” when I turned 13.

    He laughed. But not for long. 🙂

    Aw, a fun Misten story. Dogs out here react strangely to the Goodyear blimp which floats through the sky. There was one border collie that was brought to the park regularly by a dog sitter who was terrified of the thing. I took a picture of him cowering under the bench and peering up at it one day when it hovered overhead.

    It’s Friday — and another goodbye lunch for a colleague who’s moving on. 😦

    We trudge on …

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  26. The model horses — https://www.breyerhorses.com/model_horse_hobby — were the big collector item when I was growing up. I had a friend in Girl Scouts (they were staunch Presbyterians and my friend bore a striking resemblance to a young Jack Kennedy, strangers even came up to her once when we were in a coffee shop and remarked on it) who had a lot of them.

    I didn’t collect them but always admired her collection. 🙂 Horses somehow were a big attraction (still are) for pre- and teenage girls in the west, anyway.

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  28. The Real, we could just call her Lizzie, after the famous literary character by one of the English language’s greatest authors, Jane Austen. Jane Austen novels were the favorite book fare of I and my circle of friends when we were teens (though I privately liked Dickens a little better), and we loved the 1995 A&E production of Pride and Prejudice. I saved my money to buy the entire set, then only available on videocassette; and we used to have Jane Austen marathons in the summer (the video player was in the basement where it was coolest), while we hulled strawberries that we had picked, or snapped beans, or processed some other kind of garden produce.

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  29. I have a moment here since I have a funeral to attend at 1:00.

    I like Lizbeth as an alternative.

    My husband’s ex is named Elizabeth and goes by nickname Libba, probably what older sisters called her when young since she was the baby. Husband once called her Radio Station WLIBBA, which was cute since she was quite the nonstop talker. I am very quiet in comparison.

    I did grab up Miss Bosley’s look-a-like dad cat this morning while outside thinking she got out. Having lost his thick winter coat, he looks even more like her. He wiggled away and I was again shocked to see I had the wrong cat. Miss B had a whole lot of sniffing going on when I came back inside. He was kind not to bite or claw me.

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  30. Donna, I’m a little shocked by this. How embarrassed his dog must have been to have a sitter like this: “a dog sitter who was terrified of the thing. I took a picture of him cowering under the bench and peering up at it one day when it hovered overhead.” Who was more offended by you taking a picture of the cowering man, the person or the dog?

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  33. Sadly (but good for Rocky, the blimp-fearing border collie), the post no longer is available, according google. 😦

    I’ve been remiss and keeping up the pets blog ever since our online editor told us that blogs were passe and didn’t drive much traffic (and I was burned out on it anyway, it was a time-consumer and began to feel more like a burden). 😦

    Maybe I’ll try to relaunch something else pet-related.

    It’s been a cause of personal guilt for some time now.

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  34. Misten is having the kind of day dogs dream of. This morning we had wild turkeys and white-tailed deer out in the field. A half hour ago we had a helicopter fly overhead. Now a farmer is out plowing our back field with a small tractor, and while he was doing so, our next-door neighbor started mowing. Now a pickup drove out into the field, and the men from the tractor and the pickup are out there talking. Misten barked initially, but now she’s just standing out there thrilled to be alive on a day like this.

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  35. Wait, now you’re saying it was the dog that was afraid of the blimp? Your previous post seemed to indicate you had photographic evidence of a dog-sitter under a park bench (presumably while the dog bows his head in shame to be associated with such a man).

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  38. Cheryl @ 10:58
    “… (there’s just no way I want to watch the same movie more than once over three days, let alone three or four times…”

    Cheryl, the first time I watched “The Last of the Mohicans” (the newer one) my wife went to bed and I watched it again. The cinematography, the story and the music just got to me. They all went together so well.

    Later talking with a co-worker I started to put the history of the times with the story. The scene with the British Colonel facing the French General. The scene where the American settlers are talking with the English General about having the militia join the fight. You have to watch this in the wide-screen version so that you can see that the soldiers are on one side of the screen and the Americans are on the other side of the screen with a wide gap between the 2 sides.The British on the left, the Americans on the right. The ending action scene where the father runs after his son, swatting down the enemy as he goes by them. The first American Superman, shooting, running, shooting again and again but never missing with muskets finally loading and reloading on the run.

    That movie was something special for me, still is.

    For those of you who want to see the American revolution in movies in order:

    “Braveheart”
    “Rob Roy”
    “The Last of the Mohicans”
    “April Morning”
    “The Patriot”

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  39. As for the CA wildfire, Wednesday I was driving north from LA when we saw it from I-5. We turned West on CA 2 0toward Clear Lake and drove by it. We saw the entire thing on the side of a big hill/small mountain. It was 107 degrees in Dunnigan on I-5. We saw several CalFire trucks going to it.

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  40. I just got home from the funeral. I learn what special people these older folks are that I have been going to church with when I attend their funerals. This woman was surprisingly survived by her husband (married 57 years). She attended Emory School of Nursing and became a head nurse in the psychiatric section. I knew she sometimes served as nurse for VBS but that was all I knew. She met her husband at Emory. He was on a ship at Pearl Harbor that got demolished, but about a day before it got hit he developed appendicitus and was sent off the ship to take care of that. He has had horrible bouts of cancer in the past few years but has overcome it. She was diagnosed with cancer only about a month ago and went so quickly. Her body was cremated so that explains the delay on the service.

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  41. Bob, it’s not impossible that I’d ever rewatch a movie right away to see what I missed, or whatever. Just unlikely. And to watch three or four movies three or four times each over one long weekend? No way. That would truly be torture for me; I can’t handle that much screen time, even if I like it all. It would be the equivalent of getting stuck in “It’s a Small World” at Disneyland.

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  43. Donna, I had a few model horses, but nothing fancy. I’d tend to get one for Christmas each year when I was about 10-13, and I had a shelf with several of them on. No extras like barns or saddles, just horses. But in either fourth or fifth grade, I used to spend a bunch of recess hours with a girl who was a classmate for only that year, maybe even just part of a year, and we’d talk about horses and draw horses, and occasionally one of us would bring one of our models to school.

    Several years ago in an art museum I realized I was always drawn to the statues of horses, but that the figures on their backs weren’t the reason for my attraction, just the horses themselves, and I wondered if anyone ever did statues just of rearing horses or whatever, not horses with riders. A year or two later, in a catalog I found a set of miniature horse figurines, all glossy black, in multiple poses. There were eight in the set, and it was inexpensive, and so I ordered the set. I had a perfect place to display them in Nashville, because my kitchen had a plate display shelf near the top of all the lovely pine cabinets. One eventually broke (he wouldn’t stand up the way he was supposed to, so I attached him to the wall with poster putty to keep him on the shelf, and eventually he fell off anyway), but I still have most of them. I don’t have any of my childhood ones, though.

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  44. Elizabeth is certainly a versatile name. I have come across:
    Eliza
    Elisa
    Liza
    Lisa
    Lizzie (Lizzy)
    Liz
    Lizbeth
    Libby
    Izzy (Izzie)
    Beth
    Betty (Bettie)
    Bet
    And now, Kim has added a new one, Sabeth. At least two of those variants have become names in their own right, Eliza (rarely used these days) and Lisa. If you add the Latinate variant Isabel (Isobel, Isabelle, Isabella) that adds a whole other list of variants – Belle, Bella, etc. Elizabeth, as you all know, is Biblical in origin from the Hebrew Elisheva: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_(given_name).

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  45. May I call her AJ and Cheryl’s Arrow? 😉 Happy Birthday to the lovely young lady.

    I know IRL two Elizabeths and one Elisabeth. Elisabeth is Elisabeth. Elizabeth and Elizabeth are Liz and Beth. I know some Lisas and Bettys, too, but don’t know whether those are short for Elizabeth/Elisabeth for some of them or not. (Two of the Lisas I’m almost positive are simply Lisa.)

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  48. When I was in the 4th or5th grade some of the girls in class got some nice small posters of Kentucky Derby posters. They would practice drawing the horses. I think I begged a poster from one and tried drawing horses for awhile. I don’t think I ever had a model horse though. They are so beautiful. When we go to Hilton Head we always pass by the stables and sometimes get out of the car and walk around checking out the horses and other animals. Riding bikes and horses are popular on Sea Pines. Of course, we just ride in our car. 🙂 We are fortunate to do that by world standards. 🙂

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  51. The Liz/Elizabeth problem reminds me of my sister. She wanted her first child to have a name that could not be shortened or had no nick-names, so they chose Levi. At the birth, the doctor asked his name and then said “Welcome to the world, Lee”. Poor guy. Not 30 seconds old and had his name shortened.

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  53. Thing is, Peter, nearly all men’s names get shortened, or could. You could be Pete. Cheryl could be Cher or Sherry, but is at least as likely to be Cheryl. I’d guess that most girls’ names are usually kept long, and most guys’ names usually shortened, but I haven’t done an actual study of that. It just seems like you hear Jim and Mike and Greg and Bob and so forth more than you hear the full names. And some names are “shortened” with names just as long, like Charles to Charlie.

    Now, I have five brothers, and most of them have names that can’t be shortened. One has a name that can be shortened, and he never ever goes by his full name. (He gave me away, and he wanted the shorter name on my wedding program, since that’s all he uses.) One brother has a name that is usually a shortened version, but my mom gave him the short version and not the longer one. (He’s Jeff, not Jeffrey, though my mom often called him Jefferson and I think she should have given him that name. I imagine she would have if she had thought of it before he was born.) And, let’s see, my oldest brother has two biological sons, both of them with names that can be shortened, but neither of them is; my next brother has two sons whose names can be shortened, but they went by full names until they were adults, and then I think both shortened them; my fourth brother has four sons, all of whose names are commonly shortened, and only one of them uses a shortened form. My sister has four sons, and only one uses a shortened version of his name, and my sister wishes people called him by the full name. So I guess it’s safe to say full names are most common in my family. Most of the women use full names, too, but we don’t have nearly as many females.

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  54. One of the sons was given the shortened name at birth but requested the full name at adoption. I often call him by the full name but he is fine with the shortened.

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  55. Cheryl @ 2:56

    “It’s a Small World…” 2 or 3 Christmases I work at Disneyland as a Toy Soldier in the Christmas Parade. We started the parade beside the Small World ride. Pinch your nose shut and hum the Small World theme saying nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. I understand your pain with Small World.

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  59. Happy Birthday to Elizabeth!

    One nickname for Elizabeth that Roscuro missed (or I missed reading) is Betsy. I know a young woman who goes by that.

    My middle name is Elizabeth, & I think it is a lovely name. Not fond of Liz, but Lizzie is cute. Karen doesn’t seem to usually be shortened to a nickname (except for our Kare). I always wished I had a nickname. Supposedly, Karen was once a nickname (diminutive) for Katherine, which happened to be my mom’s name. (Both names mean “pure”. Elizabeth means “consecrated to God”. May I live up to my names.)

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  61. Karen, I’d probably be OK with Cher except that someone famous (and not my favorite person) is who I associate with that name. And I might be OK with Sherry except that my mom told me more than once that when she was thinking about naming me Cheryl she was so afraid I might get called Sherry, but several people she knew assured her they knew lots of Cheryl’s who never got Sherry. So I kinda felt like I wasn’t allowed to accept that one (though I’m sure Mom never thought of it that way). My husband said he’d be inclined to call me Cher sometimes except I’ve told him it doesn’t feel like “me.”

    In college, I had a roommate whose best friend often called me Cher. I told her repeatedly that was not my name. (Not just “I don’t like it” but it isn’t my name. She might as well have called me Caroline, which is another variation of the same name, but it doesn’t happen to be mine.) And each time she told me, “My sister is Cheryl, and we call her Cher. It’s affectionate.” Um, no, it isn’t affectionate the third or fourth time the person has said, “That’s not my name” and you’ve simply explained your reasoning without apologizing. If it wasn’t for the famous Cher and that clueless person, I’m sure I’d be OK with Cher . . . it just doesn’t feel like me at all.

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  63. BTW, that photo is not cropped at all, except to make it square. It is pretty cool to be able to zoom in and get that much detail of the moon.

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  65. Yeah, Donna, that one. Thanks, friend. 🙂 Actually, I haven’t ridden on it since I was about 12 and I didn’t find it too horrible then. But my husband has often mentioned hearing about someone (I don’t think it was him) who was on that ride and it got stuck, so they had to listen to that music nonstop for three hours or something, and I think that’s his idea of Purgatory.

    In Chicago, I would occasionally hear someone tell how the first thing she did when she got up every morning was to turn on Christian radio (WMBI), and the last thing she did at night was to turn it off. Now, I liked WMBI well enough, but when I’d hear someone say that, I would think, Her poor children. How awful it would be never to have silence in one’s own home! I imagine they would get used to it and drown it out (so what’s the point?), but my idea of Purgatory is pretty much any media that is on nonstop, especially TV.

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  66. Soooo, one of our cabin leaders water-skied on a picnic table today 🙂

    We also had 9 wake boarders behind one boat today – that was pretty cool as they went past the beach!

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  67. Oh, more broken legs?

    It’s a Small World can be a respite if you’ve been traipsing all over the park for hours on end. Ten minutes of drifting, floating through a pleasant-enough faux landscape with brightly-dressed singing robots …

    Pirates of the Caribbean is similar but edgier. 🙂

    I spent 2 “grad nights” at Disneyland — on a date with a senior when I was a junior and then with some girlfriends as a senior. But grad night lasted all night long, it really was a bit too much. Most of us were more than ready to re-board the bus at dawn after having gone through “Small World” and “Pirates” at least 2 times each just to kill time after a while.

    I went to DL for the first time in years about 3-4 years ago, had a really fun time, they do run a pretty cool (and clean) attraction with lots to see — a lot of the old stuff but also lots of new things in the California Adventure section, many of them based on the more recent films like Toy Story, Up, Cars, Frozen, etc.

    I have friends who love it so much they buy the annual passes so they can go anytime — I can’t really imagine wanting to go to DL any more often than once every several years though. And I have no idea how families even afford it anymore. But somehow they do, the attendance keeps booming even with the admission price increases.

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